Trump lied about peace, but will deliver only misery in Palestine
Trump’s victory has sent shock waves through global politics. His far-right government-in-waiting has promised to deport millions of immigrants, block action on climate change, slash and burn social services, further empower the police and more. His administration will be chock filled with billionaires and bigots, and their mission will be to recast the machinery of the US state in their image.
Trump’s foreign policy agenda is less clear. He is without question a champion of US power on the world stage. But he also presents himself as an outsider and a free agent. He likes to dress up his admiration of and dealings with various dictators as an example of peaceful coexistence. He also used his opposition to the Iraq war to attack Hillary Clinton and the Washington establishment back in his first successful presidential run in 2016.
Trump tried to play the same game with Israel’s war on Gaza. Though a long-time supporter of Israel, he insisted that the current slaughter would never have happened with him in charge. He appealed to those who were rightly furious with the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel’s genocide and declared himself a peacemaker. “The Muslim and Arab voters in Michigan and across the country want a stop to the endless wars and a return to peace in the Middle East”, Trump said in a stump speech aimed at Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan. He also repeatedly attacked Harris for her association with the Cheney family, who were central to the so-called “war on terror” that devastated Iraq and Afghanistan for decades.
This rhetoric resonated with sections of the Arab and Muslim political class. After being invited to join the stage at a Trump campaign event in Michigan, Imam Belal Alzuhairi of the Islamic Center of Detroit explained his support for Trump in simple if deluded terms: “We as Muslims stand with President Trump because he promises peace”. The Yemeni mayor of Hamtramck, the first city in the US to elect an all-Muslim city council and a Muslim mayor, also endorsed Trump. (Others in the Arab and Muslim community, as well as the Palestine Solidarity movement, chose instead to campaign for a boycott or for the Greens’ candidate Jill Stein.)
It is too early to know whether Trump was successful in relating to the small minority of voters motivated by Gaza. On the one hand, the Council on American-Islamic Relations released a set of exit polls that indicated Muslims saw through his cynical appeals. According to this survey, 21 percent of Muslims voted for Trump versus 20 percent for Harris, down from 69 percent who backed Biden in 2020. If their polling is accurate then the story isn’t the small shift of Muslim voters to Trump, but a collapse in their loyalty to the Democratic Party and a concomitant surge in support for Stein, who according to this poll won a staggering 59 percent of Muslim voters.
Unfortunately, these positive findings are contradicted by other data points. The Associated Press’ VoteCast exit poll found that 63 percent of Muslims voted for Harris, essentially a status quo outcome. Yet the Arab American Institute conducted pre-polling that showed a split of 41 to 40 for Trump and Harris among Arab Americans, a significant shift given that they have typically backed Democratic presidential nominees by substantial margins. The election results from Dearborn, Michigan, the largest majority Arab American city in the US, signalled an even more dramatic shift. There, Trump won 42 percent of the vote compared to 36 for Harris and 18 for Stein, a radical shift from Biden’s 74 to 24 smashing victory over Trump in 2020.
We may never find out just how many Palestine supporters bought Trump’s absurd claim to be a peace candidate, how many voted for him simply to punish the Democrats for their stance on Gaza and how many backed him for other reasons. The issues aren’t easy to disentangle.
But regardless, the truth is that Trump is just as committed to US imperialism and to Israel as his Democratic predecessors. This has become increasingly clear as he has begun constructing his administration, a who’s who of war hawks, Zionists and far-right freaks. Trump’s Middle East team is arguably even more extreme in its support for Israeli aggression against the people of Palestine, Lebanon and beyond.
The headline pick is Mike Huckabee as the nominee for US ambassador to Israel. This is a guy who once declared that “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian”, before conceding a few years later that if these non-existent people insisted on having a country, then it should be constructed on existing Arab territory. He opposes any Palestinian control over land in historic Palestine.
Trump’s proposed defense secretary is Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host and a current white nationalist. He has built his career by defending US soldiers accused of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hegseth has also advocated the construction of a Jewish temple on the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque—a position so extreme that even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not support it.
His pick for United Nations ambassador is MAGA hatchet woman Elise Stefanik, who has championed the repression against Palestine solidarity activists across America. Like most supporters of Israel, Stefanik relies heavily on the spurious claim that opposing Israel’s crimes is inherently antisemitic, accusing both student protesters and their targets in university management of this crime. In a recent speech to the pro-Israeli think tank Endowment for Middle East Truth, she declared her task would be to represent Israel’s interests in the “den of antisemitism” that is the UN.
In many cases, these despicable figures will simply be continuing the genocidal policies already established by the Biden administration. For instance, Stefanik’s Democratic predecessor Linda Thomas-Greenfield vetoed four separate motions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. And while Trump has criticised Biden for not supplying the Israelis with sufficient weaponry, this is purely for show. A paper by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs estimates that the Israeli war effort has benefited from an unprecedented $22 billion in US aid and related military expenditure in the last fourteen months, supplemented by an additional 100 arms deals too small to require congressional reporting. Through these measures, the Democrats have granted a state carrying out a well-documented genocide the largest military aid package since World War Two.
But this is no reason to shrug our shoulders at the prospect of Trump. The presence of far-right and ultra-Zionist figures in the Trump administration could lead to dramatic new developments and allow Israel even more scope for aggression. During his last administration, Trump led a number of countries in recognising all of Jerusalem as Israeli territory and moved the US embassy to that city for the first time. Like many of Trump’s worst decisions, the construction of a new US embassy on stolen Palestinian land in Jerusalem was upheld by the Biden administration.
Trump secured peace deals between Israel and a range of regimes in the Middle East and North Africa. While this was a primarily symbolic move by states that in practice had never seriously sought to confront Israel, these deals, grouped under the umbrella of the Abraham Accords, were a substantial diplomatic victory for the Israelis. Trump and his allies now have their sights set on convincing the Saudis to sign on, a move which would largely complete the political isolation of the Palestinian people, further insulating Israel from anything approaching regional opposition.
While nobody who backs Palestine should mourn the defeat of Harris and the Democrats, we cannot be complacent about the incoming Trump administration. Trump and his monstrous cabinet are primed to enable the Israeli far right’s most violent and expansionist policies. We cannot yet know what horrors they will unleash on the people of Palestine, but we know from the past year that the Democratic Party will be no opposition. It will be up to us.
As well, there will be opportunities to build new alliances with other groups targeted by Trump’s reactionary agenda and relate to the general instability his leadership will generate. Activists and organisers need to be ready to respond and use the widespread revulsion at the monsters taking over the White House to strengthen the movement for justice, peace and liberation in Palestine.
